Having worked at one of the largest, and most tightly controlled, data repositories, it may be that I am biased. But, I see a clear role for a new breed of service companies to help facilitate the freeing up of large data assets in a manner that also works from a compliance & security (and, no doubt political) perspective. Not quite “middleware”, but rather ”middle service”…firms like Mashery, or widget application developers like JS-Kit, are needed to help provide a singular point of contact to the large data systems on the back-end and the rapid proto-typing, restful (and restless!) start-ups eager to mash-up the data and explore the “nooks & crannies” of various business models and ideas.
For example, one area that is desperately lacking is an “Affiliate Network” for application developers that includes not only affiliate payment commission tracking (and proper ad serving within the widgets) but also API key management and compliance monitoring. Commission Junction, Affiliate Fuel, are you listening? Banners ads are dead, long live the widgets!
One thing that also needs to be cleared, however, is ownership of the “platform” or connection technologies. Contracts should have flow-through rights that both enable the middle-service firms to retain long-term advantages, but provide legal and marketing relationships to the large firms as well…similar to how existing affiliate networks operate from a “relationship” perspective and DART from a technology angle.
Expecting large data repositories or firms engaged in businesses that generate large amounts of data, but where data dissemination is not their core business, to build the necessary API management, payment mechanisms, and developer network programs is just unrealistic (unless you are Google!). Third-parties will be critical in this process of bringing this “dark data” into the light, and linking in big data assets for the better of all.
ACEdge
So, we are precisely two days in to the release of our “Ed McMahon” series of videos that compliment our “traditional” FCR Band jingle commercials. While completely unplanned from a timing perspective, their release has coincided nicely with our YouTube cover song contest (of aforementioned jingles).
While we were careful (and contractually limited) not to link the Ed promotions to the contest directly, we did cross link accounts and micro-sites. And, are working on the generally accepted internet principle of more content = more activity across all properties. It seems to be raising awareness and both campaigns seem to be feeding off each other. However, we have yet to see any bloggers commenting on both campaigns or referencing each as a component of the other (or an overall strategy). We’ll see how that plays out. My initial take-away is that we *should* have been more dilligent with securing rights to Ed across media for *all* purposes, so we could have more flexibility with mash-up work.
On a related note, our YouTube homepage spot (an expensive proposition indeed) does seem to have been “worth it” in terms of exposure for and activity in, our contest. Probably would not have been as successful without it. This bodes well for YouTube as a “broadcast” medium for us. We’re stlll crunching the $/eyeball and activity numbers, but it looks promising (despite the hefty price tag). New initiatives of iTunes and T-shirt gadgets to help extend the brand and interactivity should also help. Also, *really* glad we engaged such a savvy blogger such as @Halcyon to handle our community outreach. If ever anyone doubts that talented community managers should *not* be part of the media budget, please email me directly. It is worth weight in gold.
More “results” to follow, of course we’re only 1/2 way through the show, with voting not set to begin until the week of 11/2. But, already we’ve received some very good, engaging covers of our ads, and it’s great to see folks engage with your brand like this….good stuff!
Stay tuned,
ACEdge
http://www.twitter.com/ACEdge
Last month I posted about how we were implementing the mindset, and rigor, usually associated with traders or portfolio managers on Wall St. to our Account Executives/AM’s for their online marketing efforts. Well, we are one month in and making great strides! Today, not only did we implement and test everyone on the concepts and metrics around a Portfolio Improvement Index (basically an index of Revenue and Spend achievement vs. Orders) but introduced how we will shortly be introducing the notion of Risk as a mathmatical element in deal negotiating! Word.
Fantastic results: we are seeing more clearly which deals are profitable and which aren’t, and which partners introduce more volatility to our performance. I will be so excited, if we can actually achieve a perspective of online marketing such that we can create and effective Index for the overall internet and then, of course, be able to evaluate the Alpha and Beta of a particular partner, deal, placement or even creative! Can you imagine?
Ta-dow! (or should I say, Ta-DOW?:-)
Stay tuned for more results…
ACEdge
O.K. not really #368. I wish I had the time to post all the gory details of our emerging attempts at cultivating a community on (and off) YouTube. But, unfortunately, I also need to actually spend time *cultivating* said community:-). However, as some of you know by now, we have some new media assets available to compliment our wonderfully (or alarmingly, depending on your view point) catchy commercials.
One of these *new* assets involves Ed McMahon describing in rythmic detail, all his credit problems and how it nearly ruined his “golden years”. OK, some spin there. He really raps. And, it’s kinda funny, and kinda related to credit! how’s that?
But, it has nothing to do with our commercials and cover song contest (http://www.youtube.com/freecreditreport shameless plug). So, what does a social media novice do?
Well, we’ve decided to integrate him in some of our creative and channel page, and we’re going to cross-link the sites (www.freecreditreportband.com & www.freecreditreportsongs.com ). Hopefully, we won’t confuse the heck out of the 1500+ contest participants we have. We have coined the term “ensemble” marketing, and we hope this Jazz inspired approach of cacophony marketing, will elevate all levels of awareness and engagement, without thoroughly convincing our growing followers that we are nuts! (Which is true, but not pertinent).
More to follow…we’ll post “Ed” on Tuesday 10/14, which is exactly mid-way through our contest which ends 10/31…so we should be able to measure any pops we get. He’ll also be on some National TV, so we’ll be measuring offline to online…interested? You can also follow along with us on twitter for more “real-time” stats… www.twitter.com/ACEdge .
A
I’ve been working on a few contests lately, and have been thinking about trying to leverage the power of Micro-blogging to raise the awareness of charities and my brand simultaneously.
Thanks to Shannon Paul’s post: http://shannonpaul.wordpress.com/2008/10/03/learn-the-rules-so-you-can-break-them-well/
I have new ideas on leveraging Twitter to encourage folks to identify with a charity publicly and have my firm count replies with the “winners” receiving a donation from my firm after a period of time. Seems like a great way to “give back” while encouraging more conversation. I plan on reaching out to twitter to see if it would be possible to work on a new tag that could be auto-inserted on replies to make it easy for folks (so they don’t need to think about their charity score until it’s over). Thoughts? Anyone else doing something like this? Let me know…
ACEdge
So, our contest launched successfully on Monday (9/29)…along with over 400 comments on the video lead in page, we’ve received over 1100 channel subscribers and 27K channel views. We’ve a long way to go to keep the contest chatter interesting, and of course, keep spreading the word, but it seems we are off to a good start.
Our one and only requirement was to “have fun”, which is probably the best way for a large brand like ours to start testing User-generated media; but we’re also getting a lot of requests to extend our presence into other social areas…so we’ll see…
Technically, the Google/YouTube team have been great to work with, and the Analytics provided (for free) a welcome addition. Still, would like to see more case studies and or data on promotion “outside” of the network. We’re embarking on that now, so I will certainly relay what we “find” out on twitter, FF, FB, Myspace, et al…
Wish us luck..
ACEdge
On the eve of our large YouTube Video Cover song contest, I just wanted to give a shout out to the guys who really burned oil to pull this off (lawyers notwithstanding). We leveraged two groups…Saforian (www.saforian.com) for the YT channel page design, and creative direction for the micro-site (thanks Todd!) and Royal Pink Productions (www.royalpinkproductions.com) for the lead in video ad, as well as overall spiritual guidance and community moderation, many thanks Halcyon!
I, for one, certainly could not have done it without them, and interestingly, in my humble servant opinion, neither could my company. Despite our enormous online resources this is still a new area for us, with various challenges (we’re .Net [I have no idea why] and these things seem much easier to pull off with OS/PHP) and these “side projects” have odd timelime needs. I’ve talked a lot about how web 2.0, in my opinion, means for large enterprises the need to establish a “forward recon” team—capable of exploring all the “nooks & crannies” of technologies and ideas in order to find the most promising. But, it is even more true when exploration turns into “micro-execution” and / or real testing.
So, wish us luck on our this new chapter…I will feed some results of the contest as we get them…
ACEdge
Within any large company different agendas compete. No different where I work. One of the ideas that was batted around was leveraging celebrities who had gotten into financial trouble as spokepersons for our brand. Not a shabby idea. And, our first effort (psst…Ed McMahon) I thought was hilarious.
Still, there is the little manner of “releasing” such content. I prefer a more robust social media strategy where we engage with users *beforehand*, talk about our efforts *beforehand* and even share a little (or a lot) of what we’ve done right, what we screwed up, etc…I even prefer seeking feedback as we create assets and information to help guide its creation. Seems very consistent with “Web 2.0” to me…
Not so to others here. Fair enough. Develop in a vacuum and *hope* it resonates. I suppose, if it is truly creative and compelling it will. But, still seems like we miss out on authenticity of community and it generating that true sense of connection with our brand. Here, many seem to think a win is if a blogger blogs about us. To me it seems a win is getting the community to “comment” about us and engage with us, regardless of channel. We still seem to be focused on “uni-directional” messaging.
On the brighter side, it isn’t cheap to create “compelling” short film, and brands (ignoring the immediate gut gringe of commercialism) can act as a producer of (last?) resort.
Will keep you posted on whether we created an egg or started a new chicken…stay tuned!
ACEdge
